Election results are not a break with the past – Joop – BNNVARA

Unfortunately, the Netherlands is a majority right-wing country. It was already that way before November 22nd. Two-thirds of the Senate is completely right-wing. And look at the BBB-dominated Provincial Executive. The government is there for big companies and higher incomes. The Netherlands as a tax haven. And internationally? Rutte IV backed Netanyahu ‘unconditionally’ and almost had our UN representative vote against a resolution calling for humane Israeli action in Gaza.

The progressive opposition is framed as the left-wing danger that will lead our country to the abyss if it comes to power. Hoho, this isn’t polarization, folks, it’s about facts. Because polarizing is what those left-wing moralists do with their whining about our cool policy. The fact that D66 leans economically to the right and GL/PvdA consists of good parties that had no problem joining the BBB-dominated Provincial Executive, including SP in Limburg, does not fit in with Rutte’s polarization model at the moment. The election results are not a break with the past.

Criticism of polarization is usually limited to the noise that two extremes, self-appointed or not, produce. Can we have an ounce less, folks? Whereupon the media then suggests that only those two extremes exist. The rest is silence.

But polarization models are of little use to anyone who wants to describe and analyze the recent electoral movements of voters. After all, as political scientists have shown for decades, these two so-called extremes are both in one of the electoral segments in which voters move between a number of parties.

A condition is of course that those parties do not differ too much from each other, otherwise the step for the voter from one party to the other is too big. A VVD member from Laren will never vote for the SP.

Of course it is extremely regrettable that PVV could become the largest. That is precisely why the silliest and most reassuring response to this is that three-quarters of the voters did NOT vote for Wilders. So we can sleep peacefully, just like in the time of H. Colijn.

Unfortunately, VVD, NSC, BBB and CDA are each PVV-light in their own way, if you look at their programs across the board. Subsequently, it was not an issue for these parties that after Rutte dropped his cabinet on immigration, his party used this item as a spearhead in the campaign.

Their supporters are eager to govern with Wilders and research shows that they have little objection to the exclusion of certain groups of voters and a strong leader who is allowed to bend the rules. Outgoing Minister of Justice Yeşilgöz-Zegerius has not only opened the door to Wilders, but also to right-wing populists in her own party such as Paul Slettenhaar and, as Joop reported, Halbe Zijlstra. They could well take a seat as dissidents in a cabinet that their party only formally tolerates.

The fact that Wilders is sticking out a middle finger to the constitution is both true and a threat to the democratic constitutional state. But the Rutte cabinet regularly raised the middle finger against democracy in the shelter of backrooms. Only recently, when the person who emerged from the reporting on the benefits affair as the heartless executioner par excellence, was elevated to VVD honorary member. Even Wilders can learn something from this middle finger in terms of shamelessness.

As is known, Rutte’s ruins were made possible by the changing coalition partners PvdA, D66, CU and CDA, including for two decades by CDA member Pieter Omtzigt. And in the beginning they tolerated the PVV. For thirteen years also with parliamentary majorities via votes from PVV, FvD, BVNL, JA21, BBB and SGP. Yes, the list of accomplices with Rutte I-IV is long. The election results are not a break with the past.

We see two types of incorrect reactions to the election results on the left. The first is that the people have spoken and we must respect that. The people? Especially the infotainmenters, the bloggers, the influencers and the juicers have spoken. This reaction is invariably accompanied by soothing talk about Wilders who is of course going to put water in the wine and that part of his program is actually quite left-wing. How so? Lowering things like direct taxes, but not raising taxes at all on high incomes, wealth and profits, let alone on pollution. And PVV is known to be the quickest to compromise on those (allegedly) left-wing points.

The second wrong reaction is to concentrate the all-too-understandable anger on Wilders and PVV and not on the above parties that are directly or indirectly prepared to get their hands dirty – an expression that has rarely been as appropriate as it is now. Not only dirty hands for reasons of power, but also because they think they can realize part of their program in Wilders I. Attack these parties by appealing to the constitution and democracy.

A problem for the left is that right-wing voters also often identify our major problems. A process in which poor facilities and transport in rural areas, poor education, poor care, expensive energy, urgent housing shortage and poverty are becoming increasingly worse. But these voters suffer from, as Marx saw, a false consciousness. Because the parties of their choice deal in exactly the wrong solutions. Transport, education and healthcare in particular are being demolished by their market fetishism, which has also left housing construction completely at the mercy of investors and project developers. The market and the way in which it is facilitated by neoliberal governments are to blame.

So, as Francisco van Jole pointed out, in the long term it is not about the men and women who lead the parties, but about the voters who we have to convince of good alternatives and the creation of a media climate in which this is possible. Alternatives without xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, our own people first and the reintroduction of the death penalty. Sorry, mistake, the latter is the SGP. A Protestant party by the way, Francisco.

The left has no choice but to work together more and more. Not only with other political parties, but also with action groups, national and local. With citizen initiatives. There is often knowledge and experience that the parties do not or insufficiently have.

An ounce less moralism and an ounce more pragmatism is not unwise. Try to convince farmers who do not want solar panels on agricultural land that they will from now on be mandatory on office and industrial buildings. Housing is indeed not being built in the meadow, but built into built-up areas, in empty offices and shops, on flats from the fifties and sixties, and all this under the direction of the municipality. Especially socially, because the children of populists also want a home. Try to convince xenophobes near Tata, Chemours and mega stables that their health is at stake. Show them that their children do not get a home because the government is not interested in social housing.

But on the left, you will panic to seek cooperation and sometimes swallow a lot. The coming right-wing populist cabinet demands as much left-wing, progressive unity as possible as an opposition.